Samantha Power, who has served in the Obama administration in various roles since its inception, and is now the ambassador to the UN, made her name by calling on governments, and the American government in particular, to intervene actively to stop genocides from taking place abroad. Yet so far, the administration has done nothing to prevent genocide in Syria. Michael Totten writes:

We’ve already received a few early warnings that Assad might be inclined toward genocidal behavior. The U.S. government estimates that the regime killed 1,429 people with chemical weapons in Ghouta outside Damascus on August 21, 2013, and a few dozen more in Aleppo earlier that year. . . .

Other warnings of potentially genocidal behavior have been ongoing. The government and its local allies—Revolutionary Guard Corps from Iran and Hizballah from Lebanon—have been plausibly accused of ethnically cleansing Sunni Arabs around the core cities of Damascus, Homs, and Latakia.

There have been plenty of warnings, one after another. . . . Ethnic cleansing, though, isn’t the same thing as genocide. Theoretically, an area could be ethnically cleansed without a single fatality. . . . In practice, [however], modern armies that commit ethnic cleansing usually commit genocide. At the very least, it’s a warning that genocide may be coming. Whether or not Assad has crossed the line yet is debatable. . . .

But there’s another army doing grisly work in Syria that has clearly crossed the line and is unambiguously guilty of genocide. No ideology in the world right now is more inherently genocidal than that of Islamic State.

While President Trump has begun his term with a flurry of executive orders, their implementation is another matter. David Wurmser surveys the bureaucratic hurdles facing new presidents, and sets forth what he thinks should be the most important concerns for the White House regarding the Middle East:

The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas may be necessary in order to retrieve whatever live hostages Israel is able to repatriate. Retrieving those hostages has been an Israeli war aim from day one.

But it is a vital American interest . . . to allow Israel to restart the war in Gaza and complete the destruction of Hamas, and also to allow Israel to enforce unilaterally UN Security Council Resolutions 1701 and 1559, which are embedded in the Lebanon cease-fire. If Hamas emerges with a story of victory in any form, not only will Israel face another October 7 soon, and not only will anti-Semitism explode exponentially globally, but cities and towns all over the West will suffer from a newly energized and encouraged global jihadist effort.

After the last hostage Israel can hope to still retrieve has been liberated, Israel will have to finish the war in a way that results in an unambiguous, incontrovertible, complete victory.